In November, when Pauline Chalamet debuted in The Sex Lives of College Girls as Kimberly, many viewers were surprised to learn that Timothée Chalamet had an older sister, let alone one who acts. Although Pauline had made her feature film debut alongside Pete Davidson in Judd Apatow’s comedy The King of Staten Island a year before, it was her leading role in the HBO Max comedy-drama series that served as her big break. Pauline’s humorous performance as a dorky, sheltered, school-loving college student was sweet and tender and with the show having just been renewed for a new season, it also solidified the Chalamet siblings’ standing as a force to be reckoned with.
Such is the cultural positioning of the Chalamets, that when I meet their mother, Nicole Flender, on a gray Tuesday afternoon at The Drama Bookshop in Manhattan, we lower our voices when mentioning Timothée to avoid being overheard by anyone shopping in the bookstore.
I can see aspects of Timothée and Pauline in Flender – all three have petite noses and that same angular, youthful smile. But Flender has done a good job at being relatively unaffected by the fame of her children. “I’m happy that they’re successful and safe and healthy, and I would feel that way no matter what their profession was,” she tells me. As she passes along her vaccination card to a sales associate, no one assumes she is the mother of two successful actors, one rising, and the other Oscar-nominated.
On the face of it, Flender is a normal mom who fills her time with hobbies like reading and traveling. An online search of Nicole Flender brings you to a Corcoran Group profile detailing her work as a licensed real estate agent. The bio page mentions Flender’s successful professional career as a performing artist. Just last summer she acted in the short film Birdwatcher.
Flender grew up in an artistic family in Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood. Her father, Harold Flender, was an author and screenwriter whose book Paris Blues was adapted into a film starring Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman. Her mother danced on Broadway throughout her 20s – and Flender, a trained ballet dancer, followed in her footsteps, performing in musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof, Hello Dolly and My One and Only. Flender encouraged these same interests in her children.
“I took them to see many different plays and musicals when they were growing up, and I think seeing certain performances influenced them,” she said, noting that Timothée’s favorite was Slava’s Snowshow for its magical production. Pauline’s was Hair. “The productions they’ve seen and even growing up in New York, has informed who they are today,” she said.
Timothée has become a byword for superstardom in recent years. At age 22, he was one of the youngest Oscar nominees of all time for his performance in Call Me by Your Name, and between catapulting Chalamania, hosting Saturday Night Live, and being labeled the most influential man in fashion by Vogue, he has since become somewhat of an icon. Meanwhile, Pauline has quietly been making a name for herself – outside of her recent roles, she will act in the upcoming film What Doesn’t Float, made by the production company she set up with her friends in 2019.
Over the weekend, I met Nicole at her home, which boasts bright pink walls and features a collection of Timothée-themed keepsakes – a prayer candle portrays Timothée dressed as a saint with a goat cradled in his arms and a Dune action figure is so well crafted that even the hair is flowy. In the living room sits a shrine to the family’s accomplishments: my eye is drawn to a large gold trophy that Timothée was awarded at the Santa Barbara international film festival. It’s seated on the same shelf as Flender’s book, Cool Careers Without College for People who Love Movement; a stack of her father’s novels; and a photo of Flender and Timothée posing at the 2019 Golden Globes. Pasted on the inside of the front door are various news clippings including press for Sex Lives of College Girls, Dune and Call Me by Your Name.
Flender majored in dance at LaGuardia Performing Arts high school, popularly known as the Fame school – and her children followed in her footsteps decades later, enrolling in the drama program. Flender went on to study French at Yale, switching from a joint ballet scholarship to musical theatre after her first year. It was there she found her calling.
“They were doing a production of Gypsy and I auditioned for it and got the role of Dainty June,” she explains, about a character that is a strong alto and talented dancer. “I was sold on musical theater. I loved being in it,” she says.
Flender has been a vocal advocate for child actors’ monetary and educational rights, and for better working conditions for stage actors in general. She is an elected officer of Actors’ Equity Association, negotiating the wages and working conditions for the 50,000 stage actors the union represents. In 2003, she lobbied for a three-part bill requiring parents to obtain a permit for their children to perform; child actors to be tutored during the eight-hour work day; and 10% of the child’s earnings to be automatically deposited into a designated trust account for them.
She uses those experiences to guide her children – helping them to balance an education and a career in the arts. At the age of eight, Pauline was enrolled in ballet, the same age Flender started. “It was nice to have an opportunity to see a lot of ballets again. I saw a lot of ballets intensively when I was studying and performing, and now I got to kinda revisit that,” explains Flender. For Timothée, his family’s interest in theater paid off when, at age 20, Timothée played Jim Quinn in the Prodigal Son, at City Center for which he won the Lucille Lortel award. “He carried the show. He was the main character in the play, and he was very dynamic. I think it’s when we first got to see his true acting chops,” says Flender.
But there were times when they disagreed over the right path to take – like during Timothée’s sophomore year of college, when he was studying at Columbia. “He took the semesters off because he got professional work. And then he worked non-stop, Call Me by Your Name, Lady Bird, Hostiles,” explains Flender. Columbia conflicted with his professional career and eventually he made the decision to leave college to act full-time. Flender felt conflicted. “I always encouraged him to pursue his passion and dreams. However, I did not want him to leave Columbia. I had gone to Yale and I just felt college would help him be a well-rounded individual. But we didn’t know that he was going to become Timothée Chalamet,” she says, matter-of-factly.
“He definitely made the right decision for himself because look where he is now,” she says. Now, Flender often attends red carpets with Timothée. “I love being with my son. It’s as if we’re going to a party and he’s introducing me to some of his friends, his colleagues,” she said. “Timmy is very personable,” she adds.
Raised in Manhattan Plaza, a residential complex offering federally subsidized housing for artists in Hell’s Kitchen, Pauline and Timothée were not strangers to hearing their neighbors playing musical instruments or hitting high notes during the building’s designated rehearsal hours. But while the building is known as a former residence of megastars like Alicia Keys and Larry David, to the Chalamet family, it’s just thought of as home.
Flender’s mother lives in the building on a different floor, which made it easy for her to watch her grandchildren, take them to auditions, and pick them up after school. “ I think the kids were just happy to have the friends that they had in the building and being able to grow up next to the swimming pool and tennis courts,” Flender said.
Both children had agents and dabbled in acting, landing occasional commercials and supporting roles in TV shows and movies. Between living with a native French-speaking father and a bilingual mother, plus childhood summers spent in southern France, they picked up the language at home, which Flender says proved to be beneficial in securing French-speaking parts – although you wouldn’t necessarily know that watching Pauline stumble through a dodgy French accent in The Sex Lives of College Girls, during a subplot in which her character’s poor performance in a French language course leads to her being tutored by her roommate’s hot brother.
Flender describes her role in her children’s career as motivational and consultative, but never managerial. “I planted seeds, and our lifestyle really inspired those interests, but they always had control of their careers. I was encouraging, you know, but I wasn’t like ‘you better get this job,’” she said. More than anything, she supported them by taking them to auditions, acting as a chaperone on set, and managing the kids’ deposits and taxes.
But she didn’t do it alone. “It sort of took a village to do this,” she says, pointing to the many family members and friends who sat through performances with her children, to act as their chaperones.
There have been moments where they followed their own intuition, like when Timothée opted for switching agents. “I was sort of against that. Like I said, I’m old school – you stay with who you’re successful with. But he ultimately did switch agents and obviously it stood him in good favor,” she said. After his switch, Timothée landed a small role in Interstellar with Matthew McConaughey and went on to film for Call Me by Your Name two years later.
“My kids have taken off so far in their careers. I mean, my career was mainly in musical theater, so it was doing Broadway shows, but what they’ve attained is really stardom,” she tells me. Is this the beginning of another acting family dynasty similar to the Barrymores, the Smiths, the Baldwins, or the Douglases? Possibly, but that isn’t, and never has been, Flender’s goal for her family. As she says: “It’s very fulfilling to see how far that they’ve gone and just that they really love the work they’re doing. That’s all that really matters.”
